Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The 2008 Paradox and the Art of Not Exploding People

The morning light filtering through the cheap plastic blinds was far too aggressive for a guy who had just technically died, merged with his older self, and been reborn as a localized weapon of mass destruction.

Veer sat on the edge of the bed, a trash bag resting between his knees as he methodically swept the remaining sleeping pills off the carpet. He paused, holding a single white oval between his thumb and index finger.

“You know,” Veer muttered to the empty room, a dry, morbid chuckle escaping his lips, “in India, if you want to sleep forever, you just lie down on the train tracks. It’s free, it’s instantaneous, and the government even cleans it up for you. American healthcare is such a scam. Paying thirty bucks at CVS just to fail at dying? Peak capitalism.”

He tossed the last pill into the trash. It was a dark thought, the kind of joke that would make a therapist write furiously on their clipboard and politely ask him to blink twice if he was a danger to himself. But that was Veer. The older Veer, the construction worker, had survived decades of soul-crushing poverty by developing a sense of humor so black it absorbed light. It was his coping mechanism. If you couldn’t laugh at the absurdity of suffering, the suffering would just eat you alive.

He tied off the trash bag and stood up, walking over to the small, smudged window. He pushed the blinds aside and looked out.

New York City. Or, more accurately, a slightly grime-coated, bustling street in Queens.

For the teenager whose memories he now possessed, this view was a source of crushing anxiety and homesickness. But for the middle-aged laborer who had never stepped foot outside the dusty borders of Uttar Pradesh, it was nothing short of mesmerizing. He had only ever seen New York in pirated Hollywood DVDs on a tiny, cracked CRT television. He half-expected an alien mothership to hover over the skyline, or Spider-Man to swing past his window carrying a stolen pizza.

“Look at all these foreigners,” Veer mused, watching a diverse crowd of pedestrians hurry down the sidewalk in their heavy coats. A second later, he snorted at his own stupidity. “Wait. I’m the foreigner here. They actually belong here. I’m the illegal alien… well, legally on a student visa, but still.”

He let the blinds fall shut. He was supposed to go to school today. Senior High School. The thought of cramming his newfound, geometrically perfect Super Soldier body into a cramped wooden desk to learn basic calculus sounded like a special kind of hell. More importantly, it sounded dangerous.

Veer looked down at his hands. He flexed his fingers. The air practically hummed around his knuckles.

“Yeah, skipping school is a moral imperative today,” he decided.

He had a massive, glaring problem. His physical parameters had leaped from ‘malnourished punching bag’ to ‘Captain America’ in the span of sixty seconds. He had absolutely zero muscle memory for this level of power. He vividly remembered watching ‘The Boys’ in his past life. He remembered what happened when people got Compound V powers without the training to use them.

People sneezed and accidentally blew holes through walls. They went for a high-five and turned their best friend’s arm into red mist. He did not want to accidentally A-Train some innocent cheerleader in the hallway just because he bumped into her.

He needed a testing ground. He needed to calibrate his meat-suit.

—

Twenty minutes later, Veer stepped out of the rundown apartment building, a slightly oversized grey hoodie pulled up over his head. The crisp morning air hit his face, carrying the distinct scent of exhaust fumes, roasted nuts from a nearby street cart, and damp asphalt.

He took a deep breath, his newly upgraded lungs processing the oxygen so efficiently that the polluted city air felt invigorating. As he walked down the street, keeping a wide berth from the passing pedestrians to avoid any accidental vehicular-manslaughter-by-shoulder-bump, his eyes scanned his environment.

He paused at a corner bodega. A stack of newspapers sat on a wire rack outside. Veer casually glanced at the headline of the ‘Daily Bugle’ (which made him do a double-take, given it was a fictional paper in his universe, confirming he was firmly planted in Marvel territory).

But it wasn’t the headline about some billionaire playboy going missing in Afghanistan that caught his eye. It was the date printed in the top right corner.

Thursday, May 28, 2008.

Veer froze. He blinked. He leaned in closer, just in case his new Peak Human perception was glitching. Nope. 2008.

“Well. That’s a plot twist,” he whispered.

In his previous life, he had died in 2026. This meant he hadn’t just been transmigrated across space; he had been hurled nearly two decades into the past.

His mind immediately began doing gymnastics. If it was 2008 here, did that mean it was 2008 in India? If he scrounged up enough money for a plane ticket to Uttar Pradesh right now, would he find a twenty-something-year-old version of himself hauling bricks on a construction site?

“How does that even work?” he muttered, resuming his walk but with a much slower, distracted pace. “Do two souls of the same person just vibe in the same timeline? If I meet him, do we fight to the death for the copyright to the name ‘Veer Pratap Singh’? Or do we just awkwardly shake hands and agree to split the rent?”

He pondered the mechanics of time travel and soul transmigration for another two blocks before his dark humor took the wheel and kicked the existential crisis out the passenger door.

“Whatever,” he shrugged. “Let past-Veer haul his bricks. I have a System. He can keep the manual labor; I’m going to figure out how to punch through a tank.”

He pushed the paradox to the back of his mind. He had more immediate, practical concerns. Like finding a place to lift heavy things without looking like a freak.

—

Veer spent the next hour walking through Queens, letting his enhanced senses soak in the city. The sheer volume of information his brain was processing was staggering. He could hear the distinct rhythmic ticking of a wristwatch on a woman walking fifteen feet away. He could smell the stale beer on the breath of a guy sleeping on a park bench. It was overwhelming, but his Intelligence stat provided the cognitive processing speed to filter out the noise and focus on what mattered.

Eventually, he found what he was looking for: ‘Kronos Iron Gym’.

It wasn’t a pristine, corporate fitness center with smoothie bars and eucalyptus towels. It was a gritty, old-school bodybuilding dungeon located in a damp basement. The faint sound of clanking iron and the aggressive scent of sweat and chalk wafted up the concrete steps. Perfect.

Veer walked down, paid the bored, heavily tattooed guy at the front desk twenty bucks in crumpled bills for a day pass, and stepped onto the rubber-matted floor.

The gym was sparsely populated at this hour. A few massive guys who looked like they ate raw eggs for breakfast were grunting in the free-weight section. Veer kept his head down, his grey hoodie masking his scrawny frame.

He approached a standard flat bench press. A guy had just left it, leaving two 45-pound plates on each side. Total weight, including the bar: 135 lbs.

For the teenager whose body Veer inhabited, 135 lbs would have been an immovable object. It would have crushed his sternum.

Veer lay down on the bench. He reached up, grasping the rough knurling of the steel bar. He closed his eyes, visualizing his muscle fibers. He didn’t want to yank it up; he wanted to test his baseline.

He applied a tiny fraction of his strength and pushed.

The barbell flew upward off the rack so fast it nearly launched out of his hands and into the ceiling.

‘Clang!’

Veer’s eyes snapped open, his heart skipping a beat. He caught the bar mid-air, holding it at full extension. It felt like he was holding a broomstick made of hollow PVC pipe. There was absolutely no resistance. It was terrifyingly light.

He slowly, carefully lowered the bar back onto the hooks, making sure not to dent the metal rack. He sat up, his dark eyes wide.

“Okay,” he whispered to himself. “Note to self: The System wasn’t exaggerating. 500 kilograms is a lot.”

He realized he couldn’t test his upper limits here. If a skinny Indian kid weighing maybe 130 soaking wet suddenly walked over to the squat rack and loaded 800 pounds onto his shoulders, he would go viral before the term ‘viral’ was even a thing in 2008. The government would probably bag-and-tag him by dinnertime.

He needed to test dynamic force, not static lifting.

He wandered away from the heavy lifters and found a secluded room at the back of the gym. It was a dusty, dimly lit boxing area with cracked mirrors and four heavy leather punching bags hanging from thick steel chains. The room was blissfully empty.

Veer walked up to the heaviest-looking bag, a massive black cylinder wrapped in thick, worn leather, reinforced with duct tape.

He stood before it, taking a wide stance. He raised his fists.

“Let’s try fifty percent strength,” Veer muttered. He engaged his core, twisting his hips, and threw a standard straight right cross.

He didn’t put his aura into it. He didn’t even know how to use Nen yet. He just used the raw physical biomechanics of his 1 STR stat, dialing back the mental command to exactly half of what he felt he could output.

His fist blurred.

‘CRACK-FWOOSH!’

It didn’t sound like a punch. It sounded like a small cannon going off in a confined space.

Veer stumbled back, his eyes widening in pure horror.

His fist had sunk entirely into the heavy bag. The thick, reinforced leather hadn’t just torn; it had exploded outward on the opposite side. A massive cloud of tightly packed sand and shredded synthetic fibers erupted from the back of the bag, coating the dirty mirror and the wall behind it in a thick layer of dust. The steel chain holding the bag groaned violently, snapping a link at the ceiling mount before the entire mutilated mass of leather crashed to the floor, spilling its guts across the rubber mats.

Silence descended on the boxing room, save for the soft ‘hiss’ of sand pouring onto the floor.

Veer stood frozen, his fist still extended in the air, his knuckles completely unbruised and barely even red.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.

His dark humor instantly rushed in to fill the panicked void. “Well. If I ever decide to pursue a career as a human hole-puncher, I’m set. Also, I am definitely going to owe the front desk guy a lot of money.”

He quickly looked over his shoulder. Thankfully, the heavy bass of the gym’s sound system had masked the sound of his ballistic strike. No one was coming.

He took a deep, steadying breath. Fifty percent was lethal. If he had punched one of his school bullies with that force, he wouldn’t have just broken their jaw; he would have decapitated them and sent their head flying into the next zip code.

He moved over to the second heavy bag, praying he wouldn’t destroy the gym’s entire inventory.

“Okay. Ten percent,” he commanded his body.

He threw another right cross. This time, he forced himself to pull back, to imagine moving through molasses.

‘Thwack!’

The leather snapped loudly, and the heavy bag swung backward at a sharp, forty-five-degree angle, the chain rattling aggressively. It was a heavy, professional-level hit, the kind a heavyweight boxer would be proud of, but it didn’t rupture the fabric of spacetime or turn the bag into a confetti cannon.

“Better,” Veer nodded, a grin slowly spreading across his face.

For the next two hours, Veer treated the gym like a scientific laboratory. He wasn’t working out; he was programming his brain to operate his new body.

He practiced his punches, dialing it down to five percent, then three percent, until he could tap the bag lightly without sending it swinging into the ceiling. He moved on to grip strength, picking up discarded dumbbells and forcing his fingers to only apply a fraction of their crushing power, ensuring he could hold a glass of water without shattering it into dust. He practiced walking, adjusting his stride so he didn’t accidentally leap three feet into the air with every step.

By the time he was sweating—a light, refreshing sheen on his forehead rather than the bone-deep exhaustion he was used to in his past life—he felt confident. He was in control. He wouldn’t accidentally murder anyone today.

As he grabbed a paper towel to wipe his face, a familiar, digital chime echoed in his mind.

The translucent blue screen materialized in front of him.

[Notification: Basic Physical Training registered.]
[Reward: +10 EXP]

Veer raised an eyebrow. “Just ten? Guess punching bags and gripping dumbbells doesn’t count as ‘High Danger’ or ‘Extreme Effort’. The system is a tough critic.”

But then, a second chime followed.

[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]

Veer’s eyes widened as a sudden, rushing wave of cool, revitalizing energy washed over his body. It felt like standing under a waterfall on a blistering summer day. Every microscopic ounce of lactic acid in his muscles was instantly flushed out. The slight heavy feeling in his legs completely vanished.

He pulled up his status panel.

—

Hunter: Lv3 (1/10)
Affinity: Enhancement
…
HP: 30/30
AP: 3000/3000
Fatigue: 0%
…
STR: 1
AGI: 1
VIT: 1
INT: 1
PER: 1

[Free Stat: 10]
…
Skill: None
…
[Quest]
[Library]

—

“Fatigue reset to zero upon leveling up,” Veer noted, a massive smile breaking across his face. “That is an incredibly broken mechanic. I love it.”

He looked at the bottom of the panel. Ten free stat points. He had leveled up twice, gaining five points per level. Since he only needed 3 EXP to hit Level 2, and presumably 6 EXP to hit Level 3, the 10 EXP from his workout had perfectly pushed him over the threshold.

Now came the important part: Stat distribution.

His eyes lingered on the Strength stat. It was tempting to dump all ten points into STR. If 1 STR equaled Captain America, what would 11 STR look like? The Hulk? Superman?

But Veer shook his head, instantly rejecting the idea.

“Absolutely not,” he muttered, glancing at the murdered, sand-bleeding heavy bag in the corner of the room. “One point of Strength is already too much of a liability right now. If I push it to eleven, I’ll probably crack the tectonic plates under New York just by tripping on the sidewalk. I need to be able to interact with normal humans without turning them into a fine mist.”

He looked at the other options. Agility was good, but he was already fast enough. Intelligence and Perception were useful, but he didn’t need to boost his Nen pool yet since he didn’t even know how to unlock his aura nodes.

That left Vitality.

More Vitality meant higher maximum HP. It meant stronger internal organs, tougher skin, and most importantly, higher stamina. If his stamina increased, his fatigue would build up slower. If he could work out longer and harder without getting tired, he could generate more EXP. It was a self-sustaining loop of endless grinding.

“System,” Veer commanded mentally. “Dump all ten free points into Vitality.”

‘Ding!’

[Stat Points Distributed.]
[Milestone Reached: Vitality has crossed 10!]
[Passive Ability Unlocked: Minor Cellular Regeneration.]

The blue screen refreshed instantly.

—

Hunter: Lv3 (1/10)
Affinity: Enhancement
…
HP: 40/40 [Recovers 0.1% per minute]
AP: 3000/3000
Fatigue: 0%
…
STR: 1
AGI: 1
VIT: 11
INT: 1
PER: 1
…
Skill: None
…
[Quest]
[Library]

—

Veer let out a long, slow breath as a deep, resonant warmth settled into his bones. It wasn’t the explosive, rushing heat of his first stat upgrade. This was a grounded, anchoring sensation, like the roots of an ancient tree sinking deep into the earth.

The passive HP recovery was a beautiful bonus. At 0.1% per minute, he would passively heal any minor scrapes, bruises, or internal exhaustion without even trying.

“Alright,” Veer said, pulling his grey hoodie back up and making sure his face was shadowed. He took one last look at the destroyed heavy bag, grabbed a spare towel, and nonchalantly tossed it over the massive tear to hide the spilling sand.

“If anyone asks, a bear broke in,” he mumbled to himself, quickly exiting the boxing room.

He had tested his strength. He had confirmed his timeline. He had leveled up. It wasn’t even noon yet, and he was already feeling like a completely different person.

Veer pushed the heavy glass doors of the gym open, stepping back out into the bustling, noisy streets of 2008 Queens, New York. He slipped his hands into his hoodie pockets, a dark, amused smile playing on his lips.

He was ready to face this world. But first, he needed to find a place that sold really good shawarma. Being a Super Soldier apparently made you incredibly hungry.